AND HABITS OF DIAXENES DENDROBI, GAHAN. Mi 
poorness of the plant. Pseudo-bulbs that normally would have 
borne three flowers only produced one, and sometimes none at 
all. The young pseudo-bulbs, following attack on the plant, 
were only half the size compared with the growth made in a 
previous year. 
The females after copulation lay their eggs in the pseudo- 
bulbs, often at the apex from where a leaf springs. I believe, 
from the amount of food a larva eats, that, unless the pseudo- 
bulb be a very large one, only one egg will be laid in a 
pseudo-bulb, I certainly found two eggs laid in the pseudo- 
bulb of a Coelogyne cristata, and also two in one pseudo-bulb of 
a Coelogyne flacceda, but this I feel sure was due to the beetles 
not having a sufficiently large number of plants to lay on. In 
both of these cases I had to remove one larva and place it in 
another pseudo-bulb. | 
The eggs hatch in less than a fortnight, and the grubs feed 
greedily. They bore a tunnel down the pseudo-bulb from the ~ 
place of hatching, the surrounding tissue browns, and soon all 
down one side of the pseudo-bulb the decayed brown-blotched 
channel invites the attention of the observer to the destructive 
work of the enclosed larva. All the soft parts are then mined 
away, so that nothing is left of the pseudo-bulb save the outer 
epidermal rind and the strands of fibro-vascular bundles which 
run longitudinally down the hollowed-out pseudo-bulb from end 
to end like strands of fine string. 
The larve wriggle about very actively if laid on the ground or 
held in the hand, while in their tunnels they move as easily and 
as readily backwards as forwards. 
If the pseudo-bulb has been too small and has not afforded 
enough food to the larva, the latter immediately proceeds to 
mine through the rhizome until it reaches another sound pseudo- 
bulh, into which it enters. One such larva that did not find 
enough to satisfy it in one Coelogyne cristata pseudo-bulb 
tunnelled through 3 cm. of rhizome and up into another, which 
it completely gutted. This method of leaving one pseudo-bulb 
and entering another was often observed during the experiment. 
I may add that larvee removed from their tunnels and placed by 
themselves alongside a broken-off pseudo-bulb were quite able to 
make an entrance. On an infested plant the pseudo-bulbs may 
